Mar 02 | Closing Market Report

Todd Gleason: 00:00

From the Land Grant University in Urbana Champaign, Illinois, this is the closing market report for the March 2026. I'm extensions Todd Gleason coming to you today from the iHotel and the Landowners. Conference. Coming up, we'll hear from Kurt Kimmel, agmarket.net, about the marketplace and how it has reacted to the developments in the Mideast over the weekend. Jonathan Koppas, ag policy specialist, will join us to discuss the CRP or Conservation Reserve Program and its potential use in the farm bill and development as a further tool to help farmers maintain prices across The United States.

Todd Gleason: 00:40

And then we'll turn our attention, of course, to the weather with Mark Russo of Everstream Analytics. And at us, it will be here too from University of Minnesota to discuss the marketplace on this Monday edition, the closing market report from Illinois Public Media. Kurt Kimmel from agmarket.net now joins us to take a look at the marketplace. Hi, Kurt. Thanks for taking some time with me today.

Todd Gleason: 01:03

Made for an interesting weekend with the developments in Iran. Did it have much of an impact on the commodity markets overnight and into today's trade?

Curt Kimmel: 01:13

Mainly the, energy sector and outside market sector for the most part. US crude oil prices started out with a surge, you know, dollars 6 to $8 higher as we record this. The market has calmed down somewhat with the crude oil up about three point five dollars four dollars a barrel. The main concern there, of course, is the transportation through the Mideast. And, I don't know if any oil producing facilities have been hit for the most part, but, that's where most risk on is.

Curt Kimmel: 01:50

When you look back in past history during the Gulf conflict, Iraq, Kuwait, most of the premium is priced in the marketplace fairly early. So I don't know if we've done that yet or not or still have some more or so called another shoe to fall yet, but most of the world is watching the transportation through The Middle East just come to a complete halt. Believe just about everybody knows somebody knows somebody's been stranded on on on travel, and of course most of the ships are, are at foot. As far as the grains go, initially, the, the concern is, China. China is a big buyer of Iranian oil as you know.

Curt Kimmel: 02:29

So, what's going to happen from that? The market's taking it fairly well as we enter the last part of the session with the old beans down five, new beans up a half a cent, more bearish breading uncertainty on future demand of old crop. Then lastly too, the little up in early opening trade was met with the market reaching up the upper end of the trading range. If you draw a downtrend line on the corn chart, we're there. And on the bean chart there, we've got kind of a double top.

Curt Kimmel: 03:02

So we've we've met some upside objectives. It might be time here to consolidate until we get a better handle on who's doing what around the world.

Todd Gleason: 03:11

On the other side of this, some of the fundamentals in the marketplace, what are you watching? For instance, the size of the crop in South America, acreage, and any kinds of predictions that might be coming out, for the March report, those sorts of things?

Curt Kimmel: 03:26

Yeah, we got a lot of information or news or moving parts in front of it. The Southern Hemisphere continues to chug right along. Not a whole lot of news out of the Southern Hemisphere as yield goes, so kinda tells me it's fairly good. Usually you hear if it's not up to expectations. The key is those beans have been, anticipated.

Curt Kimmel: 03:52

They're coming out in a timely fashion. Now we're gonna start to focus on the weather forecast for that Suprena crop. We'll have, the weather guys watching two hemispheres. They'll be watching the Southern hemisphere for that. Then they'll be watching the Northern hemisphere as we see how this weather unfolds here in the next few days because it's extremely dry out there.

Curt Kimmel: 04:13

As far as, the future expectations here, I I think if you stop by the beef house Tuesday morning, you'll get a full round of information on on what most of the amps are looking for as we move forward here, Todd.

Todd Gleason: 04:28

I will make note, of two things. You and I are talking early today because I am hosting the landowners conference on campus at the iHotel here at the University of Illinois. And then tomorrow, of course, you will be at the Beef House along with a bevy of the rest of our analysts, parts of the FarmDoc team as well. The registration links for that went down over the weekend, so I left the price tag just the same as it was. No hike going into it.

Todd Gleason: 04:54

So if you wanna come, walk ins are welcome, of course, but it's easier if you just fill out the registration form and pay before you come because that's what's going to happen when you get to the beef house. Doors open tomorrow at 07:30AM. Reg and the program starts an hour later at 08:30. Those are central times. It's 08:30, 09:30 if you're in the Eastern time zone in Indiana.

Todd Gleason: 05:18

And we're sure looking forward to having you there, Kurt, on the corn panel in the afternoon. It should be just a a fantastic day. The Beef House is always a great day.

Curt Kimmel: 05:27

Oh, yeah. It's always great to be able to visit with everyone one on one. And two, you got a great lineup, a lot of the analysts have some great ideas on how to kind of handle, this risk premium we're starting to see increase as we move into the new crop planting season here. And, I'm sure it's going to be another good event even though it might rain a little bit.

Todd Gleason: 05:52

Indeed. It's, might rain just a little bit. That's fine. It should be a great day. Hey.

Todd Gleason: 05:57

And look forward to having you there, and thank you so much.

Curt Kimmel: 05:59

You bet. See you on Tuesday.

Todd Gleason: 06:01

Mhmm. Kirk Kimmel is with agmarket.net. He joins us here on the closing market report on this Monday. You can see him tomorrow at the Beef House in Covington, Indiana, but go to your website at willag.org and register today. We'll see you tomorrow.

Todd Gleason: 06:21

I'm University of Illinois Extension's Todd Gleason. We're now joined by Jonathan Coppess, agricultural policy specialist and member of the

Todd Gleason: 06:28

PharmDoc team here on the Urbana Champaign campus of the University of Illinois to talk about an article that he's written for the PharmDoc Daily website. This one is titled now would seem like a good time to think seriously about the CRP that stands for the Conservation Reserve Program. I wanna know why you wrote the article. Why is now a good time to think about CRP?

Jonathan Coppess: 06:51

Well, I think, the shortest and simplest answer, Todd, is I am concerned about where things are going for farmers in the ag economy. I'm concerned about, you know, some of the lessons from history, we may be missing and inadvertently recycling. And so CRP, the Conservation Reserve Program, is kind of our backbone, our foundational conservation program. And it was enacted in 1985 in the depths of the 80s farm and soil erosion crises. And it is a critical program.

Jonathan Coppess: 07:31

It was not reauthorized in the reconciliation bill last year. So it's in a state of uncertainty. It is reauthorized, but there's been no changes to it in the bill before the House Ag Committee. But I think what we're looking at with the uncertainty around tariffs and trade and markets and the price and input challenges, you know, CRP had dual purposes. And so I think it's, you know, my as I'm trying to sort these things out and address the concerns that are real clear on on all of our, in all of our minds right now.

Jonathan Coppess: 08:04

It's one of those times where this might be a policy. I think this is the kind of time where we should really think about how this policy can help us or help farmers.

Todd Gleason: 08:13

When did CRP come into being?

Jonathan Coppess: 08:15

Well, the the version we have now came about in '85.

Jonathan Coppess: 08:20

It was probably the first version of it was 1956 in the soil bank, and then before that, kind of a version of it 1936. But we do see it in this dual purpose role in times of natural resource challenges, so the Dust Bowl in the 30s, the droughts and dust problems in the 50s, and then the '80s, where you had soil erosion, which also tend to coincide with economic crises and problems. So the Great Depression, the '50s price and cost squeezes, and the '80s economic crisis. So these things tend to work together, unfortunately. And that's where a program like CRP has this dual purpose.

Jonathan Coppess: 08:58

Helps preserve or reserve highly erodible or environmentally sensitive lands, rent them out of production so they're not causing problems. But renting land out of production is also valuable in terms of dealing with an oversupplied market or a series of market challenges. And so while nobody, and it's not a set aside program, I know it often gets thrown into that mix, It is a useful tool to address both soil erosion and natural resource concerns, as well as market uncertainty and challenges. And so the point of this article is, again, thinking through these issues, this would seem to be one of those times. I realized we're not in an eighties crisis or anything like that.

Jonathan Coppess: 09:46

I think that we all want to avoid that. That would that would tell you know, the the history would counsel us to get ahead of the problem, not wait for the problem to show up on our doorstep.

Todd Gleason: 09:54

How big in nineteen eighty five, eighty six was the CRP program expected to be?

Jonathan Coppess: 09:59

So it was initially enacted with a acreage cap of 45,000,000 acres. And right now, the acreage cap is an arbitrary 27,000,000 acres, and we are right about the cap based on FSA's report data reported.

Todd Gleason: 10:14

That leaves a lot of room, particularly if this is an arbitrary cap for the expansion of their CRP. I suppose that's what you're really arguing for at this time.

Jonathan Coppess: 10:24

Well, I mean so I think one part of the again, this is kind of brainstorming, right, or brainstorming on paper, trying to think through these issues. So I don't know exactly what the policy like, I'm not trying to say that should be this or should be that. I just think we need to think about how it could be helpful at this point in time. So I think CRP over time is maxed out. I think the most was ever enrolled was about 35,000,000 acres.

Jonathan Coppess: 10:49

But what we also need to factor in is that CRP today is not what CRP was in the 80s. More than half of these acres are not that whole field's enrollment taken out of production. Out of the 26,000,000 acres in the program now, we're looking at over 8,000,000 in continuous practices, which is really what we see predominantly in Illinois. So grass waterways, field buffers, those sort of things. Another eight or 9,000,000 acres is in the grasslands program, which can be used for grazing.

Jonathan Coppess: 11:20

And we're trying, you know, we have issues with beef prices and rebuilding beef herds that could be useful there. And then just that last seven or 8,000,000 acres is in the whole field general enrollment. And so one of the things I think about, could lift the cap, That's kind of a straightforward thing, put more acres in, that can help on both sides of conservation and market challenges. But I also have been thinking about this cap and the arbitrary nature of it. And the concerns usually are that if you take whole fields out of production, it could impact other aspects of the market and rural economies.

Jonathan Coppess: 11:55

But that same set of concerns doesn't apply to a continuous set of practices. So could we say the cap only applies to the general whole field enrollments and that there isn't a cap on continuous because really we can use grass waterways and buffers anywhere, Right? And it doesn't take Lakers out of production that could be in a problematic way. It's it's helping production most likely.

Todd Gleason: 12:17

Yeah. And for the taxpayer who's funding this, it feels as if that has a a twofold effect. One, it's not taking land out of production. It is productive, but that might not be that productive. It's a smaller amount, and it has the added benefit that when these these things are put in place, grass waterways and buffer zones and such, that they really are conservation and they clean up water.

Jonathan Coppess: 12:48

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Todd Gleason: 12:49

And so the the taxpayer gets a twofold benefit out of it, and the producer, in my opinion, also gets benefit from it.

Jonathan Coppess: 12:57

Absolutely. In fact, I would say there's a threefold benefit here because if this can be used effectively to avoid, you know, further economic catastrophes for farmers, then we're not, then the taxpayer isn't making bridge payments at 12 and $15,000,000,000 a clip. We won't see ARC and PLC payments as large as we're likely to see. So it can cut down the costs of all the assists, sort of this is one of those kind of an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure. And so if we could prevent problems from getting worse than they are now, we don't have to pay for all the ad hoc and other assistance if we can try to use a program like this to manage the challenges and the uncertainties in front of us.

Jonathan Coppess: 13:43

So that's sort of the thinking here is if the house is going to consider this legislation, now would be the time to maybe step back and say, okay. Can CRP really using its dual purposes help farmers in this moment? And and and I think that's the sort of bottom line of this or in this case, probably the top line with the title.

Todd Gleason: 14:06

By this legislation, you mean the Farm Bill legislation before the house at the moment?

Jonathan Coppess: 14:10

Well, again, I I don't know if we can call it a Farm Bill, but it is certainly, legislation authorizing programs that were in previously in Farm Bills, and one of those is CRP. And so because they're considering CRP, this would seem to be a real opportune time to see if we can get an ounce of prevention to stave off what could be really problematic. And again, these aren't just payments and market problems. We end up losing farmers. We end up seeing farmers go out of business, lose their farms, lose their legacies on this.

Jonathan Coppess: 14:41

And it's it's tragic that we don't need to go down this path again when we know what it what what what lies ahead if we don't address these problems.

Todd Gleason: 14:49

And thank you much.

Jonathan Coppess: 14:50

Thank you, Todd.

Todd Gleason: 14:51

That, of course, is Jonathan Koppas, agricultural economist from right here on the Urbana Champaign campus of the University of Illinois. One more reminder that tomorrow, we'll be hosting the all day ag outlook at the Beef House in Covington, Indiana. Walk ins are welcome. The doors open at 07:30AM central time. The program starts an hour later if you're in the Eastern time zone.

Todd Gleason: 15:14

Program starts at 09:30 in the central time zone. That's at 08:30AM. We hope to see you there. Again, walk ins are welcome. And because we had a glitch with our registration system, everything remains at $40.

Todd Gleason: 15:29

So go ahead and get yourself signed up, but do do that before you make your way to Covington, Indiana simply because once you get there, you're going to have to go ahead and fill out all the paperwork anyway, so you may as well do it in front of a computer that's easier to use on your own. The All Day I got look is at the beef house in Covington, Indiana tomorrow. That's Exit 4 off Interstate 74 on the East side of the Illinois Indiana state line. I'm coming to you today, of course, from the landowners conference right here at the iHotel in Champaign, Illinois. Up next, we'll talk about the weather forecast.

Todd Gleason: 16:15

Mark Russo is here now. He is with Everestream Analytics to help us take a look at the weather forecast. Hi, Mark. Thanks for being with us. What are you watching in the weather?

Mark Russo: 16:24

Well, Todd, we are watching the pattern here across the Central US, which is anomalously warm over the next ten days. Even some record setting warm temperatures will be likely observed here across parts of the Midwest, the Delta, and Plains States as well as we go through, especially later on this week and into early next week. After that, temperatures do look to cool down, but just back down to more normal levels here. At this time, we're not seeing any kind of a return of extreme cold, at least directly into the Central US, although there will be good cold still across Canada. Some of that does ooze into the Northern Plains middle of the month, but right now no sign of that totally plunging southward and having any kind of a repeat of the large scale anomalous cold of what we saw back just a few weeks ago.

Mark Russo: 17:19

Also of note here, especially the warmth the next ten days, are seeing an increase in precipitation across much of the Central US. So as a result, are seeing soil moisture improve across much of the Midwest Corn Belt and Delta growing areas. Also the Midwest Soft Red Belt, the vast majority of acreage will receive meaningful rainfall. The one area though that does look to miss out with this general improved pattern is much of the plains hard red winter wheat belt, which needs additional precipitation. Right now it's looking like the more favorite areas for meaningful rainfall will be in Eastern Kansas, Eastern Oklahoma, and North Central And Northeast Texas versus the core winter wheat acreage in the western parts of those states.

Todd Gleason: 18:07

That's Mark Russo. He's with Averstream Analytics. Do pick up, by the way. Your tickets for tomorrow's All Day Ag Outlook. Walk ins are welcome, but it's just easier if you register online before you come because that's what you're gonna have to do if you show up at the door.

Todd Gleason: 18:21

Registration at willag.org, willag.org. I'll see you all tomorrow at the Beep House in Covington, Indiana. We're now joined by Ed Usd, agricultural economist at University of Minnesota. Hi, Ed. Thanks for being with us again.

Todd Gleason: 18:38

Let's start by taking up pricing opportunities for both old crop corn and soybeans. Have you been thinking about whether or not producers should finish out last year's crop and begin this year's crop?

Ed Usset: 18:50

I certainly am in the world of soybeans. And, by the way, good morning. And, I was at Commodity Classic, this big show just last week, and I spoke to, 500 plus of my best friends one morning and talked about this. We're looking at well, first of all, we had a wonderful rally in the world of cash soybean prices back in November, just three months ago. And about the time I started to talk about it, we were a dollar to a dollar and a quarter off our harvest lows in mid November.

Ed Usset: 19:26

I started talking about it, of course, it went away. And, you know, it faded back to where we were, you know, by early January. Well, we've got another rally. And in fact, right now, we're looking at and and forgive me. I talk south Southern Minnesota prices.

Ed Usset: 19:45

I know they're a little better in Illinois. But we're talking a cash price of $10.50 a bushel in Southern Minnesota, and that is the best we've seen since July 2024. It's even a few cents better than that November rally. So even though and I emphasize this down San Antonio, We don't typically make highs in February, and we could make the argument that we should wait a little longer. But the fact is, last year, we did make highs in February.

Ed Usset: 20:22

So, you know, things happen. This is a great opportunity for old crop sales, which leads to new crop. I'm looking at the November contract. And by the way, it's a volatile day. We had a we were up sharply, and now everything's trading lower.

Ed Usset: 20:41

Not sharply lower, but lower. The November contract, as I talked, is at $11.26 a bushel. Todd, that's 50¢ better than we saw last year at its best before harvest. That's 50¢ better than we saw last year. You've gotta take a hard look at pricing some new crop soybeans at that level and hope to heck you're wrong if you do it.

Ed Usset: 21:13

Now I gotta tell you, I'm not I'm just not that enamored with corn prices. Yes, they are up modestly. We've got an opportunity, new crop December somewhere around $4.65. Nice. Man, I have a hard time with it.

Ed Usset: 21:36

I guess, I guess if you screw up the courage, you get a little bit sold because I like to remind people that we went sub $4, which each with each of the last two new crop December contracts in 2024 and '25. And yet I look at the May contract at $11.62, excuse me, that's the May soybean contract. I'm looking at the old crop and new crop corn contracts. They're off their lows. But I mean, by by 25¢ or something like that.

Ed Usset: 22:13

It hasn't been a big rally. I'll do what I have to do in corn, but I'm not gonna get overly aggressive. Soybeans, you gotta step up and get something done. Why? A lot of it is policy driven.

Ed Usset: 22:26

I'm not a policy expert. Policy can give. Policy can taketh away, and nothing's firm there. And, again, with November contract, November at eleven and a quarter, thereabouts. 50 better than best we saw last year.

Ed Usset: 22:47

You gotta get something done, but you'll feel good. If it does go up, you'll be just fine.

Todd Gleason: 22:55

Hey. Thanks much. I appreciate it.

Ed Usset: 22:57

Okay, Todd. Take care.

Todd Gleason: 22:59

You too. That's Ed Usset. He's an agricultural economist at the University of Minnesota. I'll see you tomorrow at the Beef House. Register today at willag.org.

Todd Gleason: 23:07

I'm Todd Gleeson.